Year after year, she said, at Pizitz Middle in Vestavia Hills, she warned her child's teachers of the girl's math and reading struggles. And year after year, her daughter performed well enough on the Alabama Reading and Math Test to allay all her teachers' fears.

She was meeting expectations. She was, that is, meeting Alabama's expectations, under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

A law that does not, state school Superintendent Tommy Bice contends, always translate into success. Bice believes it is time to raise those standards, and is recommending a complete overhaul of the state's high-stakes testing regimen.

His proposed changes include requiring higher cut scores -- the minimum score necessary for a student to pass -- for the tests already being given, and adding more components to the assessments that take more into consideration than just bubble-in multiple choice questions.

Head found out the hard way just how low the standards were. When her daughter reached eighth grade, she took the ACT-prep test Explore, and reality finally set in for her teachers. She needed help. She needed attention. She needed remediation.

"I get a letter saying they want to put her in a remedial English course in ninth grade, and I had been trying to get them to do something for years," Head said. "They finally want to start in ninth grade? It's too late."

Detect weaknesses

Bice believes the state should never allow students to reach eighth grade before their weaknesses are highlighted and addressed. And with students tested by the state in grades three through eight and 11, there is only one reason for the failure. The state of Alabama accepts too little.

"We've got to own that, because if we ever want to fix it, we have to say it out loud," he said. "It's not a reflection of anything we've done wrong. It's what we've been forced to do under No Child Left Behind."

That law has been in place for a decade and requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Each year, schools must meet moving targets in order to make what is called Adequate Yearly Progress or they will be labeled failing. That has resulted in tests with such a low cut score -- in some subjects, students can get more wrong than right and still meet proficiency standards -- that struggling students like Head's daughter can go overlooked for years.

"In AYP, it means you made it to proficiency. We want it to mean you're ready for college," Bice said of the cut scores.

Case in point: Last year, 85 percent of 11th-graders passed the math portion of the Alabama High School Graduation Exam. However, on the ACT college entrance exam -- required to get into most Alabama colleges -- just 32 percent scored well enough in math to be considered "college and career ready."

Those numbers are even more disparate when looking at the achievement gap between white and black students, a problem across the nation. Ninety percent of Alabama's white students and 77 percent of black students who took the graduation exam passed the math portion, while just 41 percent of white students and 10 percent of black students scored well enough on the math section of the ACT to be considered college and career ready.

Eighteen percent of the state's students scored high enough in all four categories of the ACT -- English, reading, math and science -- to be able to do college-level work, with 24 percent of white students and 3 percent of black students meeting the career and college readiness standards. Meanwhile, more than 95 percent of students who take the state's graduation exam pass it.

Those low standards lead to a mediocre graduation rate -- under the new four-year cohort rate used to calculate graduation rates, Alabama's is 65 percent -- and a high number of students who must take remedial courses when they get into college. A report released last week showed that 35 percent of Alabama's high school graduates must take at least one remedial course when they enter public two- or four-year colleges in the state.

The new testing system, which is still in the planning stages, would align with ACT tests that include the Explore test in eighth grade, which aids in planning high school courses and acts as an ACT-prep test; the Plan test, taken in 10th grade to measure academic development and explore career and training options; and the WorkKeys test, a job skills assessment taken in 12th grade.

The Alabama Reading and Math Test, which will also include science and writing/social studies categories, in grades three through seven would have higher cut scores aligned to the college and career readiness standards of the ACT tests.

The new testing plan also would include assessments starting in kindergarten because, as Bice says, not knowing until the third grade how the student is performing is too late. The new regimen will not affect the cut scores and standards used for AYP, and will be used only to guide instruction in Alabama so intervention and remediation can begin early, he said.

"Dr. Bice is saying, 'We're not accepting the status quo. We're demanding that we do better,' and I applaud that," said Gregory Fitch, executive director for the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. He said he sees first-hand the issues with students not being ready for the workplace or for college.

"It would put a system of checks and balances in place at every level, and at the high school level, students will be able to complete and compete," Fitch said. "I think Dr. Bice is right on in his analysis, and that we need to challenge our students more. We need to give them goals and targets to make sure they're prepared for the next level."

Head agrees.

"This makes total sense," said Head, who was asked to sit on the state's Assessment and Accountability Task Force because she has been so outspoken about the testing system.

The task force made recommendations to the superintendent recently that calls for these changes, as well as adding project-based assessments in grades six through 12, which would require that students work collaboratively on a project to build research, teamwork and persuasive skills.

The Alabama High School Graduation Exam, currently given as part of AYP in 11th grade and required before students can graduate, would become end-of-course tests that simply factor into students' grades.

If approved by the state Board of Education, the new assessment and accountability plan would be phased in and be completely implemented in the 2015-16 school year.

Head thinks about her daughter when talking about the new assessment plan.

Fall through cracks

"I wonder, would her life be different if we'd gotten help earlier? There are kids falling through the cracks and their parents don't know," she said, adding that her daughter made As and Bs in all of her classes. "I don't want another family to go through the nightmare we have. And what people need to realize is that 'college and career ready' does not mean college and career acceptance. That's very misleading."